This week seems to be a repeat of a month ago, as we prepare for another winter weather assault which may be a record-setting blizzard. If you recall, at the end of January, we had a major storm event. The piles of snow lingered until just this past week, when temperatures climbed high enough to melt much (but not all) of it and reveal lawns for many residents. Today has been mild and quiet except in groceries throughout as the milk/bread/eggs/toilet paper crowd descends to stock up in case two or three days go by without the ability to go anywhere.
Fortunately I had bread and milk, and being a member of a bulk buy club, I have TP enough to last until the spring. I did buy eggs and produce today. Now all that’s left is to hunker down all day Sunday and pray hard for no turbulence.
Many people wonder if this wild weather is the result of climate change, and that idea is definitely not far-fetched. The more mess we make on our planet, the more Mother Nature needs to do to keep up with it. When we used to have grocery stores the size of the average CVS today, and packaging which degraded in a landfill, extreme weather didn’t seem to be as common. Now we are in an age of huge mega-stores with the most bizarre products sold in indestructible plastics, and landfills brimming with junk for whom nobody wants to take responsibility.
It’s estimated that a little more than every 15 hours, we fill the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, TX (home to the Dallas Cowboys) with plastic trash. In my county, we only recycle type 1 and type 2 plastics. Sometimes there are no designations on the container, so the general guideline is “When in doubt, throw it out.” This means anything other than type 1 or 2 goes heaven knows where. This is why I have been conscious of takeout containers and how I dispose of them. Fortunately a few of my favorites are now composed of plant-based materials guaranteed to compost by itself, or paper which will turn to pulp.
If we start counting on the bottomless oceans to accept what we don’t want to handle (as in repurpose or destroy), eventually we will run out of space, and it would take more than an episode of a show such as Hoarders to fix the problem.
What this all means is that our waste generates a challenge to natural events. Gasses and runoff poison our planet, and precipitation is part of the way the Earth is cleansed. There must be a correlation somewhere. Our record-breaking storms have all seemed to come in the modern era. The biggest recorded storm was in 1888 with some 50 inches of white stuff burying everything, but we’ve had a few since the 1970s to be as inconvenient as that epic disaster.
Anyway, this second part of the wrath of nature 2026 again threatens to affect millions of people, and so we must come together and hope for a reasonably good outcome and begin digging out from the snowdrifts come Monday into Tuesday. Again. Deja vu.
Yet another storm front is being watched for the start of March.
Those of you who love snow, better you than me. I’ll be staying inside where (I hope) I can stay warm.
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